Hello all.

I'm a late bloomer, having completed my Master's in my late 40s. Admittedly, by this time I have already made Director in my career so the entire endeavor was purely for the pursuit of self-satisfaction (my dad & wife have PhDs, mom & younger brother both have Master's degrees). In my line of work, a graduate degree means jack shit... especially at my level. It isn't going to make me Executive Director, not by a long shot.

I found the entire experience to be fun, despite the hard work, because after over 2 decades in advertising, USM's Integrated Marketing Communication actually made sense and I had my professional experience to add to the lectures. Basically grad school was easier and more enjoyable than my undergrad, coz in the 90s I was just a gormless git fresh out of high school with zero understanding of anything.

The most rewarding part was the thesis as it was inspired by an experimental olfactory communication exercise that we did for a client overseas some years ago. My supervisor told me after Raya Haji I should consider working towards getting it published, but to cut a long story short there's a possibility of continuing the work at the doctorate level. I found the work exciting and revealing as it added to my work-related experience on the same topic.

Quitting my job at my age to pursue postgraduate studies that will do me no favors in my career is a no-no (mortgage to pay, retirement plans & my kids themselves will enter uni in 2 years' time). So it has to be part-time. I understand it will stretch for 6 years and there's a saying that a part-time PhD is a slippery slope to no PhD at all coz the attrition rate among part-timers is very high.

Nobody I know has ever attempted a PhD part-time.

Has anyone here attempted such a thing? Is doing PhD part-time for self-satisfaction nothing more than a pie-in-the-sky bullshit that should be buried in the deepest orifice of my mind?

It has been almost 1.5 years since I signed up as a part-time, postgraduate student, so now I'm approaching the tail end of my coursework. It's Doctoral Seminar in Business this sem and Advanced Research Methodology next sem before I need to finalize my doctoral dissertation proposal for defence. My CGPA for my coursework stands at 3.56.

Some of my classmates have the balls to do 2 subjects per semester, speeding up their journey. Like one of them, who is a manager in the healthcare industry, who has ample time during office hours to do his readings and assignments. Me, I don't dare given the crazy amount of work I need to kaotim now that I'm at the Executive Creative Director level. I have warned my CEO that when the time comes, I will start taking leave to prepare for my proposal defence. I will need to prepare my ACD and my dept to be able to run with minimal hiccups in my absence, but this will be a bloody challenge because the agency is totally dependent on me for certain day-to-day jobs.

Based on the background reading I have done so far, I pretty much know the area of research that I want to do. Surprisingly, my CEO took an interest in my published research at the Master's level so I shared with him my proposed dissertation topic since it is relevant to what the agency will face in the coming years. This is based on my experience sitting in the agency's strategic meetings and workshops where we explored the future landscape of the advertising industry. He gave his approval and blessing - this is important to me as, being a part-time student and a full-time employee, I need to manage his expectations and help him realize my proposed research may hold strategic value to the agency's business in the long run.

The preliminary problem statement and rough outline have been done, and have received a thumbs-up by Dr Shaharuddin. My methodology will have to be qualitative, which presents several new challenges at this level even though I already have experience in this area when writing and publishing my Master's thesis and at work. I will tackle this further when I start Advanced Research Methodology next sem. For now, I have to start the herculean task of attempting the rough draft of the first chapter of my dissertation ahead of time, knowing that it will probably need a shit ton of revisions in the months ahead, especially if it gets ripped to shreds during the proposal defence. My job now is to minimize that as much as I can first time out.

So here we go once again...

As strange as it may seem, I really enjoy doing my postgrad now at 50 years of age. It's such an eye-opener, due to the practical nature of the DBA programme as everything I learned during my coursework is relatable to what I do at work at the senior level and my experiences at work have helped me in my critical analyses, papers and coursework in general. My ultimate goal is to retain this symbiotic relationship between work and academia in my doctoral dissertation. To me, that's the whole point of going beyond the undergraduate level in the first place.

My father and wife who had successfully completed their PhDs yonks ago had warned me of the depression that postgraduate students suffer during their journey. I'm happy to say I suffered none of it so far, despite the crazy amount of work I needed to do. Let's see if this holds up when I finally begin the lonely journey of dissertation writing. I'm told this is where much of the head-banging happens.

I have not started the process of selecting my supervisor just yet. To be honest, I have no fucking idea at the moment as I'm not familiar with the raft of adjunct professors that UNITAR has for this purpose. I suppose I'll worry about that once I have moved further along in my proposal.